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Reviews

Reviews

by Joseph O'Neill - Fiction

Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, the hero of Joseph O'Neill's latest novel leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In a Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-La, he struggles with his new position as the "family officer" of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the "doghouse," a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped.

by Lev Grossman - Fantasy, Fiction

Quentin Coldwater has been cast out of Fillory, the secret magical land of his childhood dreams. But he can’t hide from his past, and it’s not long before it comes looking for him. He uncovers a spell that could create magical utopia, a new Fillory --- but casting it will set in motion a chain of events that will bring Earth and Fillory crashing together. To save them, he will have to risk sacrificing everything.

by Francisco Goldman - Nonfiction

THE INTERIOR CIRCUIT is Francisco Goldman’s story of his emergence from grief five years after his wife’s death, symbolized by his attempt to overcome his fear of driving in the city. Embracing the DF (Mexico City) as his home, Goldman explores and celebrates the city, which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico.

by Tom Rachman - Fiction

Tooly Zylberberg, the American owner of an isolated bookshop in the Welsh countryside, conducts a life full of reading, but with few human beings. Books are safer than people, who might ask awkward questions about her life. She prefers never to mention the strange events of her youth, which mystify and worry her still. Then startling news arrives from a long-lost boyfriend in New York, raising old mysteries and propelling her on a quest around the world in search of answers.

by Kevin Birmingham - History, Literature, Nonfiction

For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. THE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK tells the remarkable story surrounding ULYSSES, from the first stirrings of James Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933.

by Bret Anthony Johnston - Fiction

Since Justin Campbell's disappearance four years ago, his family has been stuck in the grooves of grief. They are unable to comfort themselves, let alone one another. Then the impossible happens: Justin has been found only miles away, completely okay. Though the reunion is a miracle, Justin’s homecoming exposes the deep rifts that have diminished his family, the wounds they all carry that may never fully heal.

by George Prochnik - Biography, History, Nonfiction

By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. Yet, after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer plummeted into an increasingly isolated exile, where, in 1942, he killed himself. THE IMPOSSIBLE EXILE tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while also depicting the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other.

by Peter Matthiessen - Fiction

In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred individuals gather at the site of a former concentration camp for a weeklong retreat. They will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who sent more than a million Jews to their deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, is forced to abandon his observer’s role and embrace a history his family has long suppressed.

by Ward Just - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Harry Sanders is a young foreign service officer in 1960s Indochina when a dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents --- and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman --- alters the course of his life. He marries the captivating May, who is fleeing her own family disappointments. On the surface, they are a handsome, successful couple --- but the memory of Sieglinde persists in Harry’s thoughts, and May has her own secrets.

by Kevin Brockmeier - Nonfiction

Over the course of one school year --- seventh grade --- 12-year-old Kevin Brockmeier sets out in search of himself. Along the way, he happens into his first kiss at a church party, struggles to understand why his old friends tease him at the lunch table, becomes the talk of the entire school thanks to his Halloween costume, and booby-traps his lunch to deter a thief.